Glynn Cardy 11th December 2022
I suspect the Advent themes of waiting and hope grew out of women’s, and men’s, experience of pregnancy and birth. The nine months of gestation though was condensed to some five weeks before Christmas to fit with a liturgical calendar. A wanted pregnancy brings with it a nest of feelings in that waiting period, including joys, hopes, and fears.
Not that the gestation of baby Jesus was always wanted. For it is clear from both the Luke and Matthew texts, and the innuendo in Matthew’s genealogy, that Jesus’ parentage was uncertain and illegitimate. But then, with an angelic dream (in Matthew’s telling), the child is made legitimate by the act of Joseph ‘adopting’ him.
Many of us have experienced that nest of feelings: of preparation and prenatal health checks, of hopes we have for the child and fears of what could dash them, of worries about birthing and the wonder of seeing this new life take its first breath, of what the present can sustain and the future might hold. All these feelings, realistic or not, can coalesce around the birth of a child.
Yet Advent has expanded beyond simply a gestation and birth. Into the wrap has come John the Baptist, Jesus’ mentor, who preached hope in the form of a coming salvation where a judge-warrior God would come to rescue the penitent and oppressed and slay the proud and oppressors. John was a prophet, who like other prophets before him, was calling Israelites to hope in this coming. God would come, he said, and you must be ready, baptised, and expectant.
Other writers in the 2nd or ‘New’ Testament, like the passage from the late 1st century Letter of James (note not written by James of Jerusalem) pick up this hope in a future judge-God. It is a tempting formulation of faith when your life is full of suffering and injustice. You hope in a future you can’t see.
So, returning to John the Baptist, Jesus’ literal gestation and birth is, in the hands of the gospel story-tellers, expanded to include the waiting time of Israel under colonisation, and the liberation from colonisation that a judge-warrior God would allegedly bring. Rather than bringing light to enlighten the whole world, this God would bring flames to consume those deemed to be chaff.
John the Baptist’s message was political and yet also with personal implications. As would be Jesus’.
For Jesus did not follow the theological path of his mentor. He didn’t preach the judge-warrior God. He didn’t baptise people. He didn’t tell people to wait for their salvation (political and personal) to come from a heavenly God with a heavenly army.
Rather Jesus preached a message that God was right here, right now, if only we have eyes to see. God is all around us, within us, among us, surprising us. God is in the joy of a peasant woman sweeping her floor and finding a lost coin. God is at the meal table of a tax-collector. God is in the persistence of an aggrieved woman annoying a judge so much that he pays deed to her case.
Rather than God being an off-the-planet deity coming down with righteous zeal, God in a way that upends our expectations is right here, right now, with those who know what it’s like to be poor, who know what it’s like to be shunned, and who know what it’s like to be a pain in the neck to authorities. God is in the little things, and the little people.
God is also right here, right now, when we are together. Not necessarily when we are praying, or fasting, or being pious. But in the determination of a group of men lowering their injured friend through a roof. In the courage of the women disciples who won’t be relegated to the margins, despite what some of the men try on. In the taking, blessing, breaking and sharing of bread, wine, and fish by fellowships of Jesus followers. God is in the ordinary, for it is in the ordinary that extraordinary is present.
So, Jesus the bread breaker’s message was also political with personal implications. It was about noticing that God was not just in power and might, palaces and temples, but among the ordinary, the nuisances and the nobodies. And this God was not passive. For this God had an agenda of empowerment, transformation, and justice starting from the bottom up.
This message too got wrapped up in the Advent and Christmas stories. It got written into Mary, shepherds, and a stable. It got written into foreigners from the East, a monarchical tyrant, and the fearful fleeing of the holy family as refugees.
The baby Jesus as the adult Jesus would be light and hope, not just for Jewish people of the Jewish faith, but all people of any faith or none. That is to say the wonder, the illumination, of the divine in the ordinariness of life, in the little and the least, in the expendable and discarded, is not something that any faith or philosophy has a monopoly on. God is not in the pocket of anyone. Indeed, when a church puts God in their pocket invariably God makes a hole.
As an aside, the theological descendants of John the Baptist, the Christian fundamentalists with their ‘turn or burn’ heaven-or-hell theology, do not define the orthodox middle of Protestantism. For the likes of Karl Barth (1886-1962), a Swiss Calvinist theologian, and more recently David Bentley-Hart (b.1965) an American Eastern Orthodox theologian, take the verses of Colossians (3:11) and Ephesians (4:1) about Christ or God being ‘through all and in all’ quite literally. Like the mystics before them they are saying essentially there is nowhere where God is not. There is no person, no creature, no situation outside of the energy, flow, and grace of God. There is no chaff to be burnt, no sinner to scare, no candidates for hell. Hell is a redundant fantasy. (Which of course raises questions about evil – but that’s a sermon for another day).
So, given that the Advent themes of waiting and hope are in the Jesus frame of ‘God’s reign already among us’, and not some future event, what spiritual disciplines does this season invite us to partake of? And my answer in short is a spirituality of enough, of gratitude, and of gift.
One of the things that spiritual teachers have long known about money and wealth is that it can be addictive. No matter how much or little we have we can think we always need more. We need more to be happy, to care for our family, to share with others. And the desire for more can drive us to work harder, save harder, and store up what we have as an insurance against the day when we haven’t.
In criticising this addiction, which is rampant in our society, I’m not despising money and wealth, or work, or savings. These things are tools, gifts, blessings. They can help us do things, go places, and help people. When we haven’t got them, life can become very restricted, and worry can fill our days.
Yet when money becomes the goal, determinative of our happiness, I suspect we have forgotten the discipline and contentment of knowing when enough is enough. When we have enough. When our happiness is not reliant on our stuff. When what matters primarily is relational – friends, family – including our relationship with our health and environment.
To use the analogy of food – the more we have, the more we consume, does not in the long-term make us happier but makes us overweight and unhealthy. We have to learn to politely say to ourselves, ‘Enough!’ So, it is with money.
One of the ways to counter the addictive nature of wealth is by practicing gratitude. Sitting still and thinking of all the things we are grateful for: Like life. Like memories. Like family and friends. Like the smell of coffee, or roast meat. Like the cleverness of the internet. Like the flowers in gardens. Like the shape of a spoon. Like having a meal together. Like the crash of waves. Like the wonder of space, and the magic of telescopes. Like the smile of the shop assistant. Like the joy of a dog. Like the taste of blue cheese. And on, and on, and on.
Another way of framing this practice of gratitude is looking for and seeing God in all things great and small (to quote William Henry Monk, not James Heriot). Seeing God in the ordinary, which is really extraordinary. Seeing God in the glimpses, the gestures, and in the graces we extend to and receive from each other every day.
When we think about what we are grateful for we will begin to notice more things we are grateful for. And we will, regardless of any articulation, begin to share this orientation of our life with others.
Which leads me into the spirituality of gift. This, like ‘enough’ and gratitude, is firstly a way of seeing. Of seeing your life as a gift. Not as something you deserve because you’ve earnt it, or that you are somehow better than others. Rather just sitting and absorbing the miracle of your inception, your consciousness, and your development into who you are today. Just sitting and realizing that despite whatever pain or hardships you’ve had or have, whatever losses you have suffered, your life has had and is maybe still having or will have many wonderful moments.
And from that seeing of yourself as gift, come to appreciate that you are a gift given to bring joy and hope to others. Indeed, that is our primary vocation as human beings. And it’s not hard to do. A smile can do it. A gentle touch can it. Flowers in a bucket at your front gate (with a sign saying ‘Take one’) can do it. When we take a bit of our ‘more than enough’ and share it we are living into our vocation. We are being the hope and light of God to one another.
This then is the message of Advent. We can be the hope we seek, and the hope we share. We can be light we need, and the light others need. We can be where the domain of God is birthed, and midwifes for others.
Advent Spirituality
Glynn Cardy 11th December 2022
I suspect the Advent themes of waiting and hope grew out of women’s, and men’s, experience of pregnancy and birth. The nine months of gestation though was condensed to some five weeks before Christmas to fit with a liturgical calendar. A wanted pregnancy brings with it a nest of feelings in that waiting period, including joys, hopes, and fears.
Not that the gestation of baby Jesus was always wanted. For it is clear from both the Luke and Matthew texts, and the innuendo in Matthew’s genealogy, that Jesus’ parentage was uncertain and illegitimate. But then, with an angelic dream (in Matthew’s telling), the child is made legitimate by the act of Joseph ‘adopting’ him.
Many of us have experienced that nest of feelings: of preparation and prenatal health checks, of hopes we have for the child and fears of what could dash them, of worries about birthing and the wonder of seeing this new life take its first breath, of what the present can sustain and the future might hold. All these feelings, realistic or not, can coalesce around the birth of a child.
Yet Advent has expanded beyond simply a gestation and birth. Into the wrap has come John the Baptist, Jesus’ mentor, who preached hope in the form of a coming salvation where a judge-warrior God would come to rescue the penitent and oppressed and slay the proud and oppressors. John was a prophet, who like other prophets before him, was calling Israelites to hope in this coming. God would come, he said, and you must be ready, baptised, and expectant.
Other writers in the 2nd or ‘New’ Testament, like the passage from the late 1st century Letter of James (note not written by James of Jerusalem) pick up this hope in a future judge-God. It is a tempting formulation of faith when your life is full of suffering and injustice. You hope in a future you can’t see.
So, returning to John the Baptist, Jesus’ literal gestation and birth is, in the hands of the gospel story-tellers, expanded to include the waiting time of Israel under colonisation, and the liberation from colonisation that a judge-warrior God would allegedly bring. Rather than bringing light to enlighten the whole world, this God would bring flames to consume those deemed to be chaff.
John the Baptist’s message was political and yet also with personal implications. As would be Jesus’.
For Jesus did not follow the theological path of his mentor. He didn’t preach the judge-warrior God. He didn’t baptise people. He didn’t tell people to wait for their salvation (political and personal) to come from a heavenly God with a heavenly army.
Rather Jesus preached a message that God was right here, right now, if only we have eyes to see. God is all around us, within us, among us, surprising us. God is in the joy of a peasant woman sweeping her floor and finding a lost coin. God is at the meal table of a tax-collector. God is in the persistence of an aggrieved woman annoying a judge so much that he pays deed to her case.
Rather than God being an off-the-planet deity coming down with righteous zeal, God in a way that upends our expectations is right here, right now, with those who know what it’s like to be poor, who know what it’s like to be shunned, and who know what it’s like to be a pain in the neck to authorities. God is in the little things, and the little people.
God is also right here, right now, when we are together. Not necessarily when we are praying, or fasting, or being pious. But in the determination of a group of men lowering their injured friend through a roof. In the courage of the women disciples who won’t be relegated to the margins, despite what some of the men try on. In the taking, blessing, breaking and sharing of bread, wine, and fish by fellowships of Jesus followers. God is in the ordinary, for it is in the ordinary that extraordinary is present.
So, Jesus the bread breaker’s message was also political with personal implications. It was about noticing that God was not just in power and might, palaces and temples, but among the ordinary, the nuisances and the nobodies. And this God was not passive. For this God had an agenda of empowerment, transformation, and justice starting from the bottom up.
This message too got wrapped up in the Advent and Christmas stories. It got written into Mary, shepherds, and a stable. It got written into foreigners from the East, a monarchical tyrant, and the fearful fleeing of the holy family as refugees.
The baby Jesus as the adult Jesus would be light and hope, not just for Jewish people of the Jewish faith, but all people of any faith or none. That is to say the wonder, the illumination, of the divine in the ordinariness of life, in the little and the least, in the expendable and discarded, is not something that any faith or philosophy has a monopoly on. God is not in the pocket of anyone. Indeed, when a church puts God in their pocket invariably God makes a hole.
As an aside, the theological descendants of John the Baptist, the Christian fundamentalists with their ‘turn or burn’ heaven-or-hell theology, do not define the orthodox middle of Protestantism. For the likes of Karl Barth (1886-1962), a Swiss Calvinist theologian, and more recently David Bentley-Hart (b.1965) an American Eastern Orthodox theologian, take the verses of Colossians (3:11) and Ephesians (4:1) about Christ or God being ‘through all and in all’ quite literally. Like the mystics before them they are saying essentially there is nowhere where God is not. There is no person, no creature, no situation outside of the energy, flow, and grace of God. There is no chaff to be burnt, no sinner to scare, no candidates for hell. Hell is a redundant fantasy. (Which of course raises questions about evil – but that’s a sermon for another day).
So, given that the Advent themes of waiting and hope are in the Jesus frame of ‘God’s reign already among us’, and not some future event, what spiritual disciplines does this season invite us to partake of? And my answer in short is a spirituality of enough, of gratitude, and of gift.
One of the things that spiritual teachers have long known about money and wealth is that it can be addictive. No matter how much or little we have we can think we always need more. We need more to be happy, to care for our family, to share with others. And the desire for more can drive us to work harder, save harder, and store up what we have as an insurance against the day when we haven’t.
In criticising this addiction, which is rampant in our society, I’m not despising money and wealth, or work, or savings. These things are tools, gifts, blessings. They can help us do things, go places, and help people. When we haven’t got them, life can become very restricted, and worry can fill our days.
Yet when money becomes the goal, determinative of our happiness, I suspect we have forgotten the discipline and contentment of knowing when enough is enough. When we have enough. When our happiness is not reliant on our stuff. When what matters primarily is relational – friends, family – including our relationship with our health and environment.
To use the analogy of food – the more we have, the more we consume, does not in the long-term make us happier but makes us overweight and unhealthy. We have to learn to politely say to ourselves, ‘Enough!’ So, it is with money.
One of the ways to counter the addictive nature of wealth is by practicing gratitude. Sitting still and thinking of all the things we are grateful for: Like life. Like memories. Like family and friends. Like the smell of coffee, or roast meat. Like the cleverness of the internet. Like the flowers in gardens. Like the shape of a spoon. Like having a meal together. Like the crash of waves. Like the wonder of space, and the magic of telescopes. Like the smile of the shop assistant. Like the joy of a dog. Like the taste of blue cheese. And on, and on, and on.
Another way of framing this practice of gratitude is looking for and seeing God in all things great and small (to quote William Henry Monk, not James Heriot). Seeing God in the ordinary, which is really extraordinary. Seeing God in the glimpses, the gestures, and in the graces we extend to and receive from each other every day.
When we think about what we are grateful for we will begin to notice more things we are grateful for. And we will, regardless of any articulation, begin to share this orientation of our life with others.
Which leads me into the spirituality of gift. This, like ‘enough’ and gratitude, is firstly a way of seeing. Of seeing your life as a gift. Not as something you deserve because you’ve earnt it, or that you are somehow better than others. Rather just sitting and absorbing the miracle of your inception, your consciousness, and your development into who you are today. Just sitting and realizing that despite whatever pain or hardships you’ve had or have, whatever losses you have suffered, your life has had and is maybe still having or will have many wonderful moments.
And from that seeing of yourself as gift, come to appreciate that you are a gift given to bring joy and hope to others. Indeed, that is our primary vocation as human beings. And it’s not hard to do. A smile can do it. A gentle touch can it. Flowers in a bucket at your front gate (with a sign saying ‘Take one’) can do it. When we take a bit of our ‘more than enough’ and share it we are living into our vocation. We are being the hope and light of God to one another.
This then is the message of Advent. We can be the hope we seek, and the hope we share. We can be light we need, and the light others need. We can be where the domain of God is birthed, and midwifes for others.
